Could History Hold the Best Answers to How Might We…?
By Made By Us teammate, Kaz Brecher
To power a better tomorrow, it’s never been more important to harness lessons from the past. History has been unevenly written and unevenly shared, but even if we never arrive at a singular “truth” or telling of our story, it is our aim to do better, to make the tent bigger, to understand a more multifaceted perspective. Made By Us is a beacon, a collective effort and guiding force that provides historical context and perspective to inspire action. We use our Medium presence as a forum for exposing more of our process, our perspectives, and the people doing the day-to-day work behind our projects.
History was hands down my worst subject all through school, barely scraping through my classes in high school. I was neither good at it nor particularly interested in what felt like rote memorization. And it wasn’t until I was deep into studying social psychology, deciding I would be a filmmaker, that history crossed my mind again. I designed and taught a section at Stanford called “Abnormal Psychology and Film” as a means of looking at where our cultural notions of mental illness take root. Many of us have, thankfully, never experienced living with someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, but almost everyone has vivid ideas about what that means. And those notions — right or, more often, inaccurate — shape how we behave, advocate for and vote on policies, and orient our society toward the subject.
Would I have been more engaged in history if we had used movies to bring it to life, off the page, and into a context that felt more relevant to my everyday quandaries? Cut to 2016, by which point my career had meandered from Hollywood into high-tech, and I found myself teaching innovation at the THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam and Vancouver. After years working in emerging technology, I’d become an evangelist for using Design Thinking, sometimes known as Human-Centered Design, to guide product and service development.
Pioneered and codified by industry-leader, IDEO, the basic idea behind this methodology is to address real needs as defined by the audience you’re serving — rather than using market trends or top-down whims. Challenges are most often framed by using the structure: How might we help [some user] [get their need met] given that [insert brilliant insight here]? Of course, while deriving the insight is the hardest part, even getting clear on who you’re serving and what they need isn’t easy either.
Formally, “Design Thinking is a non-linear, iterative process” which seeks to understand so-called users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test iteratively. Without all the jargon, it means that expertise needs to be balanced with intuition as you listen to your customers. It requires humility, collaboration, new ways of working, and a healthy respect for the core needs of humanity. Those needs can include “to be entertained” or “to feel inspired” but more often than not, our deepest and most powerfully-motivating needs have to do with approval, security and control in some form. And, only when our basic needs for survival and safety are met might we indulge the luxury of things like education, expression and the arts.
That same year, I was attending a Citizen University gathering called the Civic Collaboratory, a national network of catalytic leaders from across the political spectrum and many domains — immigrant rights, veterans advocacy, civics education, voting reform, tech in government, arts and culture, worker organizing, corporate citizenship, and more. We meet quarterly and provide a forum and project incubator for this diverse community of civic innovators. By design, “square pegs” like me are invited into the mix, to bring different perspectives to the fields of democracy reform and citizen engagement.
So, when Leslie Greene Bowman, the President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates the UNESCO World Heritage site, Monticello, and Jay Kaveeshwar, then with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, solicited disruptive ideas from the group, I perked up. They had a project brewing around offering historical content to younger generations shaping the future of the country, and I found myself drawn in by their passion and deep belief that the stories of the past hold enormous potential if offered in new ways. I felt the same spark I’d experienced when I connected abnormal psychology to film.
Indeed, stories offer a key to how we learn about the world, stretch our capacity for empathy and curiosity, and experiment with scenarios long before we ever encounter them, from nursery rhymes to video games. It’s why something like the Walking Dead can offer quite a lot of guidance about how we might vote. Or how the Silent History — a groundbreaking novel, written and designed specially for iPad and iPhone, that used serialization, exploration, and collaboration to tell the story of a generation of unusual children, born without the ability to create or comprehend language, but perhaps with other surprising skills of their own — could connect people across geography and time to find new ways to approach how our culture understands the spectrum of autism.
Even people like Professor and former Ambassador Michael McFaul, an expert foreign policy and Russian relations, warns that our children aren’t being set up to participate as citizens in a healthy democracy when Disney tales just remix a version of a king and a kingdom, where someone has to come to save the day. In real life, we and our communities need to save ourselves.
I spent an hour chatting with Leslie and Jay and their teams, sharing examples of multi-platform experiences and interactive art projects, done collaboratively, fostering two-way discussions between organizations and their audiences. Six months later, I was invited to participate in a broad gathering of historical institutions, where I met Valerie Donati, who had been on her own journey toward innovating in this arena. And, as I listened to Leslie talk about how Monticello was approaching the design and launch of a new and controversial exhibit about the relationship Thomas Jefferson had with his concubine, Sally Hemings, I was introduced to a new (to me) way of exploring history.
In the time of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, grappling with the reality of slavery and dealing a blow to two centuries of ignoring or covering up what amounted to an open secret, the Monticello team and Leslie, leading the charge, underscore that what Jefferson did at the time was “both the law and the norm” while noting that the law and the norms have changed and CAN change. The opportunity for us today is to take the nuance and contradictions of the whole truth in our history and use it to ask “what norms and laws might need to change today?” — then channel our energy into that.
Once the gauntlet had been thrown down, and I’d heard those questions, I couldn’t un-hear them. I began to look at everything in our culture differently, able to use snippets from the past to help me reconsider the road ahead. This brings to mind a parallel from leadership training: when I work to support teams in shifting behavior, I always ask if they know anything about the four-minute mile. For years, people thought it was impossible for humans to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Until Roger Bannister, a 25-year old medical student in the United Kingdom, did it in 1954. And no sooner had he unleashed a new wave of imagination, the times continued to fall as more and more people followed in his footsteps, pushing new boundaries.
Before I knew it, I had become just as passionate about the potential of history to power our future, if only we could present it in ways that serve the needs of the many people who might not be drawn into visiting a museum or historic site, like who I’d been back in high school. And while the current circumstances of our complex globally-interconnected world may have very different challenges and parameters than at any time in human history, if we know the stories that might be limiting our imagination, we are more empowered to innovate and build together.
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
In iterating our way forward during the early days of solidifying the vision and mission for Made By Us, a friend shared something in passing that stuck me as just this kind of “catalytic history.” I’ve lived in California almost 25 years, but I had no idea that we had been an “open carry” state until 1967.
Why might you think California changed its laws? And who would you guess was behind it? Would you believe it was the National Rifle Association (NRA) itself? Well, when the Black Panthers started to exercise their Second Amendment rights in the late sixties to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans, Governor Ronald Reagan and the NRA worked together to pass some of the strictest firearm regulations in the country. The NRA. Just about 50 years ago. For real.
With the rise of movements like March for Our Lives, led by people who were mostly born after 9/11, the question of how knowledge of our past shapes our future grows ever more urgent. However you feel about the right to bear arms, it’s fascinating, no? So many of us have accepted almost as gospel that the NRA is untouchable (despite the more well-known example of Tommy Gun restrictions in the Prohibition Era — that feels like a too-distant past). And once you know, just like Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, the options open up to more informed and creative decision-making.
It’s been 4 years, give or take, of collaborating with different teams and in various configurations, to get Made By Us to where it is today. And, building this consortium with a core value around designing and operating audience-first means the stewards of our history are developing new muscles to meet us where we are. This doesn’t just mean surveys and polls — Henry Ford presciently noted that if he’d asked what people wanted, they’d have said a faster horse. It means listening, co-creating, experimenting, iterating and amplifying what works, as the context and environment evolve, too.
With Made By Us, the commitment to human-centered design runs as deep as the passion that sparked this unprecedented effort in the first place. Whether you’re reading this on a mobile device, in a library, online at a remote military base or across the country from the doorsteps of the many partners behind this new effort, the historians and civic advocates need to hear from you.
As we head toward the 250th birthday of the United States of America, and we rapidly experiment with ways to inject history as a catalyst for civic participation — pioneering new formats for how history can be presented in relevant, real-time, accessible and actionable ways — our efforts will only be as valuable as they are useful. To you. To Us.
Democracy is a practice, not a given, and civic participation a duty — it’s up to us to harness lessons from the past and power a better tomorrow. Let’s roll our sleeves up, as we all have a role to play.
